


The Secret Life of Rhaenys

by incrediblegirl24



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Elia is more badass than anyone gives her credit for, Just Barely Cannon Compliant, Rhaegar is kind of a tool
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-05-31 20:49:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6486979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incrediblegirl24/pseuds/incrediblegirl24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elia Martell sends her daughter to her close friend Ashara. When the capital falls and all the remaining Taragaryens flee, Ashara fakes her own death and takes Rhaenys to the only place in the world where the rebels can never hope to find her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Elia Martell, The Future Queen of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros

The Red Keep was oppressive. The walls were tall and strong, no doubt, but they made her feel sick and claustrophobic. Nausea had been her constant companion in the capital. She had arrived nervous for her wedding to Rhaegar, and had soon after left for Dragonstone. She’d vomited over the railing of the ship not an hour after casting off and the Capitan had patted her on the shoulder and assured her, “You’ll get your sea-legs soon enough.”

To that Elia had snorted. She’d spent the better part of two years sailing around Westeros with her mother and brother. That had been perhaps the happiest time of her life, and she’d never gotten sick. She had egged on Oberyn while he climbed their ship’s rigging, gotten under foot of the crew, and worried their mother to no end. Oberyn had pushed her off a pier once, when they’d docked in Lanisport. No one had thought her sickly when she’d climbed back up the ladder, dripping wet, and thrown herself at him. She’d wrapped both arms around his waist and sent them both splashing back over the edge.

Years later, she’d docked at Dragonstone, and her dresses had already begun to grow tight around her slim waist. Rhaegar had ridden by her side to the castle, but had rushed to the rookery the moment they were through the gates to write to his parents about their impending grandchild. The walls of Dragonstone were tall too, but somehow damp and dank and dark as they were, they’d felt safer to her than the Red Keep. Once, she tried to climb onto the back of one of the great stone dragons, but by that point her belly had swollen far too much for such pursuits. Rhaenys had been born there, and Rhaegar had gazed forlornly at the cloudy sky. “It isn’t her, there are no stars tonight,” her husband had informed her brusquely.

“We’ll have others,” Elia replied. But her daughter’s birth had gone hard on her. Most days she had to stay in bed nursing the little baby at her own breast. Tradition dictated that the new princess must be presented to the king, and Rhaegar was growing listless and bored on Dragonstone. Still, Elia delayed as long as she dared, claiming she was still too weak to travel for six months after the birth. In her convalescence she wrote back and forth to her mother at Sunspear, her brother at the Citadel, and her dear friend Ashara at Starfall. Rhaenys had been born with the most wildly violet eyes Elia had ever seen; brighter and clearer than the king’s or queen’s, lighter than Rhaegar’s, Elia had written in a letter to her mother, “She Targaryen eyes, but they are lit with Martell sun. Otherwise she looks much like Oberyn when he was small.” Too soon, the little family had to depart Dragonstone again.

Anxiety frayed her nerves the whole time they were at sea. When they presented their new daughter to the king, Rhaella had cooed and kissed and smiled more than Elia had ever seen. The king had turned away, “She smells Dornish.” Elia avoided the king and the court as much as she dared. But on the occasions that she had to be present, the king made his distaste for the pair of Dornish princesses very clear, and her worry grew. It twisted her stomach tightly, and rarely let go. Her appetite fled her, and her waist dwindled quickly. Within a month of their arrival, she was even thinner than she had been before her pregnancy.

Her husband came to her bed almost every night, eager for the little prince of his prophecy. He rarely stayed, and in his waking hours he was always occupied in the training yards or the library. Sometimes, he vanished from the keep entirely, and no one but the Kingsguard seemed to know where he went. When they had been at court for the better part of a year, he came to bedchamber with his eyes shining. “There’s a comet in the sky tonight. The promised prince at last.” He took her roughly, and when he had finished he told her, “Tonight we’ve made a prince who will awaken dragons from stone.” She laid in bed, staring at her ceiling long after he left. A prince. Another baby. There was no question of the necessity, Rhaegar needed a male heir. She didn’t think she was strong enough for another pregnancy. The longer she thought the harder and faster her heart beat. 

The best parts of her life in the Red Keep were her daughter and her friend Ashara. Elia had half a dozen maids and many of the ladies of the court paid her visits regularly, but Ashara had been her confidant since their days in the Water Gardens. Ashara was younger than Elia, but nearly a head taller. She had the purple eyes and fair skin of the Dayne’s. Upon her arrival at the Red Keep, a fortnight after the prince and princess, suitors had swarmed like flies.


	2. Ashara Dayne, Lady in Waiting to Princess Elia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ashara adjusts to life in the capital and worries about the changes in her friend.

_“Ashara, my husband is eager to return to the capital to present Rhaenys to the king. We depart at the next full moon. Won’t you join us at court for a time? I don’t think I can stomach the filthy place without a friend.”_  
  
King’s Landing stank. Ashara could practically smell the city before she could see it. Her Sand Steed definitely could, he tossed his head and whinnied the whole way to their welcoming party. Ser Jon Connington had been dispatched to escort her into the city. Ashara frowned at the banner standing out in the stiff breeze.  
  
“Good morrow, Ser. I had hoped to be greeted by my brother. Is he unwell?” Arthur was older than her by six years, but they had been close their entire lives. She was looking forward to seeing him again.  
  
“He is well, but his duties keep him close to the king. I hope you will find me an acceptable substitute, my lady,” he replied. He did not seem to care much what she thought of him, but his eyes clung to her in a way that made her skin crawl. Ashara heard her mother’s voice echo in her memory, ‘They may call us vipers, but King’s Landing is the den of fouler creatures still.’  
  
Helpfully, her horse chose that moment to start up the head-tossing and whickering again. “Hush, you” she told him affectionately. She was spared the need for further small talk by announcing, “My mount is eager to be on to the city, as am I.”  
  
The city was much as she had expected: smelly, and loud. The press of humanity was all around her, in every street and alley. Ashara held her reins firmly in one hand and felt subtly for the knives strapped into her riding clothes and livery. She had never trained with sword or spear, but many Dronish girls wore a dagger or two. Their little party needed to pass almost the entire way through King’s Landing to reach the Red Keep on its high hill. By the time she arrived she felt dazed and ill. So far above the city the sounds had dissipated, but the smells were present as ever.  
  
She dismounted and passed the reins to the nearest groom. “Where is Elia? I must pay my respects to the princess.” All the faces around her pinched. Ser Jon looked scandalized. “And the King and Queen, if I may.” Her voice trailed away uncertainly. And so it went almost her whole time in the capital. She had thought she knew her courtesies well, but somehow in King’s Landing her words always felt twisted and wrong. Someone was always slighted and everyone was always listening.  
  
She was led to Elia’s private solar in Maegor’s Holdfast. The Red Keep was magnificent, there was no denying. Her old friend was a princess now, and one day she would be queen. They had been naked screaming children together in the Water Gardens, long before royalty had ever seemed like a possibility. Ashara grinned. How were you supposed to take your queen seriously half your memories of her were in her name day suit. Elia’s face was drawn and anxious, and the sight unsettled Ashara deeply. When they were girls, she had rarely seen Elia without a smile. But she did beam when Ashara curtsied at the door and said, “Your Grace?”  
  
“Oh, let’s not have any of that between us. Ashara, you are very nearly my sister,” Elia dark eyes were crinkled in a smile, but they also threatened to spill over with tears. They hugged for a long moment. “I’d like you to meet Rhaenys,” she said when they broke apart at last. She bent swiftly and scooped a smiling dark-haired baby out of the cradle. “Her first name day will be upon us soon, and her father is already eager for another.”  
  
Ashara cooed over the baby appropriately, but she noticed an edge of something like fear or desperation in the mother. That day she held Rhaenys for hours, surrendering her only when for feeding. Elia ordered their supper brought up to them; “We hardly even see the King unless it’s at a state function, and Rhaegar is always busy with something or other.” Ashara noticed that her friend ate only a small portion.  
  
She was given a room in the same corridor as Elia’s, and one of the princess’s maids was always on hand to attend her. They made short work of unpacking the lone trunk she had brought. She had passed her sixteenth name day and had thought she was done growing, but by her seventeenth all her gowns were too short on her again. She had left them all with her sister, who had been delighted, and packed only warm riding clothes. Her breeches had been excellent on the road, but now she needed more courtly attire. Accordingly, she spent the better part of her first week in the capitol with the dressmakers. Elia insisted that she would need all the warmest fabrics; they hadn’t been any snow yet, but the mass of gray clouds above the city had been threatening it for weeks.  
  
Arrayed in her new finery, Ashara passed most of her time in Elia’s solar. Most afternoons they were joined by one of many ladies swarming over the Red Keep. Embroidery was all well and good, but Ashara began to miss the sun. Elia was distinctly uncomfortable with the courtiers who fawned around her, Ashara quickly discovered. She often turned down invitations to dine with this lady or that lord and she only visited the gardens or the sept when she thought they were least liked to be trafficked. “Everyone here has an agenda,” she confided once, “I want no part in all their intrigues.”  
  
“You’re their princess, Elia. You must leave this apartment from time to time,” Ashara teased and cajoled but underneath there was real concern. Elia was only three-and-twenty and she already seemed resigned to a dull life of domesticity. Ashara pondered on a way to lift her friend’s spirits.  
  
Her opportunity arrived in the completely uninspiring person of Ser Jon Connington. He called on them one day when the sun was making a rather poor attempt to shine through the dingy clouds and begged the honor of Ashara’s company for the evening. “Oh it would be most unsuitable for me to go unchaperoned. Elia must come as well.” Ser Jon did not seem to care any more for her ideas inside the city than he had outside, but he was at least polite enough not to refuse the company of his princess. “Perhaps we might take a ride around the city. I’ve hardly seen anything of King’s Landing.” She hardly wanted to, but anything that got them out of this little solar was more than enough for her. Elia glared at her, but then she rose from her seat.  
  
“I’ll have to call the nurse to stay with Rhaenys,” it took a half an hour of fretting and another quarter of bundling up in wraps and scarves and boots before Elia would depart. Ser Jon was waiting for them with the horses saddled by the time they arrived at the stable.  
  
The ride was slow and fairly dull. Ashara’s Sand Steed was the finest horse in the little party. Elia had always preferred sails to hooves, but she held her own on one of the castle’s horses. Ser Jon led them and pair of Targaryen house guards up to the top of Rhaenys’s hill to see the dragonpit. Ashara was grateful for his choice when one of their guards launched into a surprisingly vivid description of the dragons that had once lived there. Ser Jon spoke very little and his clipped tones reinforced her suspicions that he had little interest in either of his companions. They didn’t stay long after the story was over, the wind was cold at their backs.  
  
A least once a fortnight after that, Ashara did her best to chivy the princess out into the world, to picnics or dances or mummers’ shows. It didn’t escape her notice that most of the invitations came from men, or that they were addressed to her more often than to the princess. Elia was withdrawn and quieter than she had been before her marriage, and it had put off some of the court. With a little egging, though, she sometimes came out of her shell and smiled or even laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think a chapter a week is going to be my goal for this story. Feel free to drop me a line.


	3. Ser Barristan the Bold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ladies vs. Knights  
> Or the adventures of two girls from Dorne who have never seen snow before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some fluff because I have to write Harrenhall and the things that happen after soon.

Snow had been quietly threatening King’s Landing for months. Barristan had seen three short winters in his life, but this year the cold settling over the Red Keep was seeping into his bones and making him feel slower and creakier and older than he’d ever felt before. He woke one morning to a gray sky slowly burying the city in a puffy white layer. A deep sigh pushed itself up from his stomach. Barristan stoked the remains of his fire and warmed his stiff joints before he sent his squire off to the kitchens for a hot meal to break his fast.  
  
He took his time eating; he had no guard duty until the evening. Just as he was musing on going back to bed to rest up for the night, a shriek broke his reverie. A woman’s shriek, he was absolutely sure, and it came from outside the White Tower. His body reacted before his mind, charging down the stairs from his small cell to the chamber at the bottom of the tower. He would have rushed right out into the snow if the chamber had been empty. Instead, he found Ser Arthur Dayne roaring with laughter and watching out the window. His golden-haired squire, Jamie, was at his elbow looking nonplussed. Barristan came to halt, unsure of the whole scene.  
  
Ser Arthur finally quieted at the same time that another shriek rose outside. “Come, have a look, Ser!” he still looked jovial despite the racket, so Barristan approached the window cautiously. There were women outside, two of them. They were so bundled up that it took him almost a full minute to place their faces. Only the pale blonde hair spilling down her back gave away the Lady Ashara, only she didn’t look very lady-like scooping up a handful of snow and flinging it into the face of the other woman. Recognition came a moment later: the woman was none other than Princess Elia. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes had a sparkle that Barristan hadn’t seen in her before. Both of the high-born young ladies were romping across the knights’ training yard like common stable hands.  
  
“They’ve never seen snow before in Dorne,” Ser Arthur piped up. “I remember the first time I came north, I thought all the white looked exactly like a desert only deadly cold instead of deadly hot.”  
  
Ser Barristan kept staring. They both look so incredibly young, he thought. His eyes were drawn to Ashara, she was practically shining in the mild morning light reflecting off the snow. Arthur chuckled again. “I think I’ll go join them,” he announced. Jamie’s green eyes went wide.  
  
“That doesn’t seem very knightly,” he said. The boy was too bold to be a squire for long, Barristan reflected. He had none of his father’s dead-eyed cruelty, but he was talented and strong.  
  
Ser Arthur chuckled again. He was so light-hearted it was easy to forget that he was a deadly warrior. “It’s not,” he nodded, “but you can’t always be so concerned with what’s proper and knightly all the time. Join us Barristan?” he added as he crossed to the stairs. “Best wear your warmest.”  
  
Barristan had a moment of indecision but then Ashara’s laugh drifted in, and he followed Arthur back up the stairs. He wore so many layers of clothing that he felt like the straw dummy the knights took tilts at in the yard.

The two knights and the squire stepped out into the bright yard together. Jamie, it seemed, had been unwilling to be left out of the adventure. Elia caught sight of them first, and her voice was louder and clearer than Barristan had ever heard it, “Ladies versus knights!” A snowball caught him in the face, all battle-honed reflexes abandoning him in a moment. The Lannister boy laughed, as did the Lady Ashara. She bounded up behind them and bowled her brother into the drift of snow that had piled up against the tower.  
“And the Ladies are winning,” she bellowed regaining her feet. Ser Arthur took a moment longer to come back up, but when he did he dumped a large arm-load over of snow over his sister’s long, unbound hair.  
  
The five of them capered around the yard until they were all winded and drenched in sweat and melted snow. By the time they retreated into the keep the sun was high in the sky and they were all sporting bright red cheeks and broad grins. “I must check on the baby,” Elia insisted. “Farewell, good Sers.”  
Barristan marched back up to his own chamber and began to feel the chill setting in again. He peeled off damp things one at a time and reflected how strange it was that he hadn’t seemed to feel cold the entire time he’d been out in the snow. He hadn’t felt old or sore either. It was almost like magic, he reflected, sinking into a chair beside the fire to unlace his boots.  
 

**Author's Note:**

> This story is taking shape slowly and with many re-writes. I'm open to suggestions. I intend to follow Rhaenys' life all the way through the events of A Dance with Dragons, but my outline is a little rough. Definitely let me know what you think!


End file.
